Blaze Pizza cofounder Rick Wetzel launched the business in 2012. It was recently named the fastest growing restaurant chain in America. (Photo courtesy of Blaze Pizza)

In 2012, Rick Wetzel set out to do the improbable: convince Americans, who purchase an estimated 3 billion pizzas each year, to buy even more. His fast-casual upstart, Blaze Pizza, has since grown from two initial sites in Southern California to more than 150 locations nationwide. This year, Technomic, a food-industry research firm, named Blaze the fastest growing restaurant chain in America. The company is expecting $187 million in systemwide revenue in 2016—almost double last year’s haul—of which the franchisor will take 5%, or $9.4 million in fees. 2017 sales are projected at $350 million. Wetzel's previous venture, Wetzel’s Pretzels, now boasts 320 stores and systemwide revenue north of $160 million. He sold most of his stake to a private equity firm in 2007 (the business was acquired by a different firm this summer for a valuation FORBES estimates at $100 million), and today Wetzel has his sights set on a $1 billion valuation for Blaze. In a recent conversation, which has been edited and condensed, he discussed Blaze’s rapid growth and its high-profile partnership with basketball star Lebron James.

Noah Kirsch: Did you always plan to become an entrepreneur?

Rick Wetzel: There’s a sort of lens you look through as an entrepreneur where you’re always thinking, “What’s the opportunity here for a business?” I’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. In school I used to buy sticks of gum for a nickel and sell them for a dime.

Kirsch: What was your first business?

Wetzel: In 1983, when I was 24, I opened a video rental store because it looked like it would be a burgeoning market. I was out there ahead of Blockbuster and everyone else. I was a kid—had no money, no capital, but decided to go for it.

Kirsch: How did it turn out?

Wetzel: I had the store for three years or so and then ended up selling it for next to nothing. It was a great experience overall and my first major learning curve.

Kirsch: What did you do learn?

Wetzel: While we had a nice single-unit business, we did not have any additional capital to invest and make it grow. It killed me when Blockbuster entered the category and ran away with it. That’s why we were much better funded when we started Wetzel’s Pretzels and Blaze Pizza.

Kirsch: What did you do next?

Wetzel: I moved out to California and went to USC to get my MBA. During that time, I went to work at Disneyland and became a guide on the Jungle Cruise. After graduating, I worked as a brand manager at Nestle for about seven years, which was like a Harvard Business School education in marketing. While I was there I met my wife, Elise, and Bill Phelps, who became my partner at Wetzel’s Pretzels.

Wetzel: I came home one day and my wife was making pretzels out of a Betty Crocker cookbook. I kind of stole the idea from her and opened a shop in Redondo Beach, Calif., with Bill and a third partner, our chef. Our bosses at Nestle found out about the side project and we nearly got fired, but we stuck it out. A year later, the company gave us the choice between a contract buyout or a new position in Ohio. We took the buyout and dove headfirst into Wetzel’s.

Kirsch: How’s the business doing now?

Wetzel: It’s doing great. We realized after opening five stores on our own that expansion was hugely capital-intensive, so we started franchising. The company now has 320 locations and $164 million in annual sales.

Kirsch: Are you still involved?

Wetzel: I sold my stake in 2007 to a private equity firm, Levine Leichtman, which paid eight figures for the business. Bill is still the CEO.

Kirsch: When did you come up with idea for Blaze?

Wetzel: Elise and I were out in Pasadena looking for pizza for lunch, but we couldn’t find anything we liked. We ended up at Chipotle, and a lightbulb went off: Why can’t we do this with pizza? We felt like there was a complete quadrant wide open in a $70 billion category, so big you could drive a truck through it.

Kirsch: But there are so many pizza chains, not to mention all of the neighborhood joints. Didn’t that concern you?

Wetzel: No, we were doing something completely different. We took a fine dining approach with better food and a better environment than our competitors, but at a lunch price point and a lunch speed. I’m essentially selling a $15 pizza for 8 bucks. It’s a “fast nickel” kind of strategy.

Kirsch: Was the goal always to make this a national chain?

Wetzel: We decided that if we’re gonna do this thing, we’re going to go for a moonshot. We found a chef and a great restaurant designer and opened two restaurants at once. We got all of our franchise documents ready, so as soon as we hit the ground we would have the ability to reach out to franchisees. And that’s what we did. Within short order we had over 6,000 franchise inquiries.

Kirsch: How did you finance the launch?

Wetzel: The initial $800,000 in seed money came from me, my wife, and Bill Phelps. Then we immediately raised $2 million from angel investors.

Kirsch: How did those first two restaurants do? Did you learn anything?

Wetzel: Really well. The Irvine location did about $1.8 million the first year and the one in Pasadena did about $2.5 million. We got it freakishly near perfect at the beginning. The changes we made as we grew were things like launching a mobile app and adding a few menu items.

Kirsch: How quickly did you start opening new locations?

Wetzel: At the end of 2012 we had 2 stores; by 2013 we had 10. We ended 2014 with 50, 2015 with 105, and we’re going to end this year with 177. By 2017 we’ll have the infrastructure so that we can do 100 more a year. We already have partnership agreements for 98% of the major markets in the U.S.

Kirsch: What are you looking for in franchisees?

Wetzel: We look for large, experienced, multi-unit partners. Typically, they own one or more restaurant franchises that are mature and have run out of development opportunities.

Kirsch: Are you worried about overextending the brand?

Wetzel: No, we never got out ahead of our skis. We also have a very small group of franchise partners, only 44. It’s very different than a company like Subway that has an unlimited number of franchise partners; we’re intimately connected and everybody communicates.

Kirsch: How do you maintain consistency?

Wetzel: Early on at Wetzel’s a lot of the franchisees would go off the rails and do their own thing, and we spent a lot of time getting everyone back on the same page. The first thing we did at Blaze was set guardrails up and make sure our franchise partners shared our vision.

Kirsch: How do you know that franchisees are executing properly?

Wetzel: The biggest thing we did when we started the company—and we had to build this directly into the P&L—is we “secret-shop” every restaurant in the entire chain twice a week. We spend about 1% of systemwide sales just on that program. Half of the money goes to the actual auditing, and the other half goes to cash bonuses to franchise partners that distribute that down to the most successful stores.

Kirsch: MOD Pizza is another new chain that is growing very fast. What makes you different?

Wetzel: The foundation of the business is consistency, and we’ve built our brand around chef-driven food, elevated service, and engaging restaurant design. We make our dough and sauces fresh every day in all of our restaurants. We’re more of an experience than we are a place to eat.

Kirsch: A lot of your competitors would probably make the same pitch. What are some specific things Blaze does that you think give you a competitive advantage?

Wetzel: There are a thousand little dials we’ve set. In every one our restaurants I put in two POS systems, a separate food line for take-out orders, and an oversized oven; everything I need to move wickedly fast. We also have a technology system that put us ahead of the competition in mobile ordering and customer loyalty programs. These kinds of things sound boring, but they differentiate us. As a result, our average unit volume is much higher than anyone in the category, about $1.4 million.

Kirsch: How did you come to partner with Lebron James?

Wetzel: After starting Blaze I went back and tapped one of the angels I worked with at Wetzel’s, John Davis, a movie producer, who found a syndicate of his friends to invest. His group, which included Lebron, took a third of the company. There was a point when Lebron decided to exit his contract with McDonald's, and it was a natural alignment for him to become an endorser for us.

Kirsch: What’s next for Blaze?

Wetzel: We’re still playing with delivery, and we’ve got to figure out what our strategy is. There’s a lot I can’t talk about yet. I’m in a highly copyable category. Everything I do gets copied.

Kirsch: Do you have plans to go public?

Wetzel: I think in 2019-2020 we’ll be in a position where we can go public if we want to. We don’t have a lot of capital expenditures, so I don’t think we’ll need to, but I have angel investors that will want liquidity. My goal would be to go out at a billion-dollar market cap.

Kirsch: What do you pay yourself?

Wetzel: I pay myself an extremely nominal salary. I’m one of the lowest paid employees inside the company, and I typically take the smallest office too. It’s good for culture.

Kirsch: Do you expect to stay with the company—or start something else?

Wetzel: Blaze is the culmination of everything I have learned in my career and is likely the last company I’ll ever start.

Kirsch: What would you start today?

Wetzel: Like Blaze did with pizza, I think there are still big opportunities in chef-driven fast-casual brands, particularly in the Chinese and Mexican food categories. That said, Elise and I plan to end our careers at Blaze.

I'm currently a reporter on the wealth team at Forbes. Before that, I spent a year on the road—driving for Uber in Cleveland, volcano climbing in Guatemala, cattle farming in Uruguay, and lots of stuff in between. I graduated from Tufts University with a dual degree in inte...